Radio free usenet

In: BYTE Magazine On: July 1995

Commentary: Arun Mehta

Avoid high
costs and thwart censorship: Post it on the airwaves

The freedom of the
Internet is under attack. Legislation such as U.S. Senator Jim
Exon’s proposed Communications Decency Act would potentially make
employers, service providers, and carriers liable for transmitting
material somehow deemed “offensive.” But the Internet is
incompatible with such censorship. Users are fiercely protective of
their freedom and will sabotage any efforts at censorship. The only
practical way to impose stringent control over what the Internet
carries is to shut it down.

Commercialization of
the Internet threatens one of its most dynamic channels: Usenet.
(Although it’s technically not a part of the Internet, Usenet is
generally delivered via that route.) In the free-for-all discussion
groups that constitute the Usenet, novices and experts mingle. You
can tune in to a news group and find the best advice on everything
from how to set up a modem, what photographic paper lasts longest, or
where to find good Chinese food in Los Angeles.

However, participation
can be expensive. While a student at a university, for instance, may
have full access around the clock to all the wonderful goodies
available, people in remote areas have to make long-distance calls to
read and download messages. Even if they never post to a Usenet news
group, just keeping up with the discussions can cost them a great
deal. Usenet has a rather poor signal-to-noise ratio, and many
people find it impractical to download a haystack to get at the few
needles.

There is a way to
attack these problems: Use unencrypted broadcasting to transmit
Usenet and public mailing lists by satellite. Broadcasting is ideal
for the Usenet because it is such a widely disseminated medium.
Digital radio has already made available most of the hardware
necessary to receive Usenet in the manner to millions in the U.S.
The cost of broadcasting a message is largely independent of the
number of people who receive it. It makes little difference whether
the recipient lives in a remote corner of Arizona or in Manhattan.

There have also been
experiments using the vertical interval of regular TV broadcasts for
Usenet. This makes broadcast Usenet compatible with the existing
hardware that cable operators use to provide their customers with TV
and digital radio signals. The technology works – it only needs to
be popularized so that the hardware becomes more widely affordable.

The disadvantage of
this approach is that people need to find some other way of posting
to Usenet. However, this is not a reason to reject the idea because
most people receive a lot more information that they post.

Of course, most people
will still have to dial in to send their messages or to receive
private mail, but you have to be a prolific user to exceed a couple
of minutes of transmission time a day. People who receive Usenet via
their cable TV connection will feel as if they are eavesdropping on a
party. They will be tempted to get an E-mail connection at least.

Broadcasting Usenet
also makes the Internet uncensorable for all practical purposes. The
entity responsible for the broadcasts can easily be located outside
the legal reach of the recipient country. Even governments far more
restrictive in their control of information than the U.S. are, in any
case, reconciled to not being able to censor international radio
transmissions.

In India, for instance,
the government makes no attempt to censor unencrypted TV signals
beamed in by CNN and Star TV, because anyone can receive them via
standard equipment. However, because the encrypted Star-Movies
channel requires decoding by the cable TV provider, the government
insists that the movies receive prior clearance from the Censor
Board.

Jerry Poournelle
predicted at the start of the 1980s that the U.S.S.R. would not last
out the decade because it would have to choose between having to
forgo the benefits of PC technology and losing control over
dissemination of information. Each PC with a printer was a potential
samizdat printing press. PCs on the Internet are even more powerful.
If stand-along PCS pose a serious dilemma for authoritarian regimes,
the Internet may easily be devastating.

Countries seeking to
compete globally will be loath to lose the benefits of Internet
access. Yet, bureaucrats find the anarchic Internet bewildering and
threatening. They are uncomfortably aware that if they ever attempt
a Tiananmen Square in cyberspace, the students will have the more
powerful tanks.